Ok for the theoretical ATPL
So I seriously doubt you attended a top uni, or majored in anything scientific or otherwise in constant flux.
What do you mean by "in constant flux" ?
For the personnal rant : oh my god there it is !! The clash between the French idea of top education and the Anglosaxon (are you English? American?) idea of top education ! The first time I have the opportunity to fight it !
Self published books, in an academic/scientific context, written by your own teachers, are worthless.
Really, it depends on what you expect of them.
Sure, if you want to publish the best thesis of the academic year, master's degree books from a teacher that discovered the subject when he got his tenure will not be enough.
However if you just want a scientific job, they will be perfect.
There are no authorities in science. You are judged on the merits of your arguments. Nobody knows everything, nobody has up-to-date knowledge on everything. Nobody has time for that. That's why we let the academic community/market forces decide on what's good teaching material and what's not.
Basically, I'd sum it up by saying that the French dean want its students to know nothing about everything, whereas the Anglosaxon dean want its students to know everything about nothing.
Some knowledge of many domains vs highly specialised knowledge of only one domain
Subsequently, the French dean does not really care if the book is not up to date nor the best.
So I seriously doubt you attended a top uni, or majored in anything scientific or otherwise in constant flux.
Would you like to see a scan of my degree ?
I attended one of 3 best engineering school in France. It is between 100th and 150th on QS ranking, the best one is Polytechnique which is ranked ~50 in QS ranking.
Note that this is despite the fact that the criteria of the QS ranking are not adapted
at all for French engineering schools.
There is a reason you won't find many french universities in the yearly top 100 rankings.
The reason is the following :
QS ranking is based on research, and size, whereas French schools like to be small and very numerous, and like to educate engineers, not ph doctors (an engineering degree from ecole polytechnique is really the top scientific diploma you can get in France, it is far far better on the job market than having a Phd from a normal uni, even the best according to QS, which is UPMC)
When I was there, I was "specialized" in aerospace engineering, but had classes in many many domains, such as finance, economy, thermal engineering, statistics, algorithmics and programming, hell, even biology ! (among various others)
Inside my specialization, I also saw many domains, such as aero engineering, combustion, structures and solid mechanics, product lifecycle management, airplane design, etc..
All books used in our engineering schools (at least the top 3 and I can safely bet it's the same elsewhere in France) are written by our teachers.
The fact is we don't aim at being the very best in one very small domain. We aim at knowing many many domains, without being the best experts on any of these domains. Each and every course could allow us to become quite good at the subject, however, as you can imagine it, it is quite difficult to be good at many things. So only the top students (the ones that work the hardest) will be very good at many things. Other ones will just work more on things they like more.
And many French graduates from our engineering schools, despite having not studied the best books on the market, have stolen are stealing and will steal English graduates finance jobs in London
To finish with, I attended a top australian uni for 6 months (40-50 in QS ranking). Some of my comrades preferred other countries and one of my best mates joined Columbia.
Really, to us, the academic level, if we chose courses whose prerequisites we fulfilled, was a joke. Sorry to say it like that.
In France, we have this system where we work our asses off during two years, then there is a selective examination to join the top schools. So we know what it is to work hard (some of my mates worked up to 70 hours per week, I was between 45 and 50 hours)
In Australia, the dean told us that for each hour of class, we should work two hours at home. This could seem daunting, since a French guy would expect 20-30 weekly hours of class, so that would be 60-90 weekly hours of work !
But in fact, we only had 13 hours of class, including 2 hours of tutorial (where is the laughing smiley when you need it ?). I did not like the tutorials so I did not attend them. We had mandatory assignments so I had to work at home, but the mandatory assignments were all I did.
We were given 3 weeks without any class to revise !! I studied like 2 days before my exams, and passed them.
Not with flying colors, this would have required learning things up to an advanced level but with a slightly better mark than the university's average.
To me, this semester was a semester of holidays !
One interesting event is the following:
During the first lesson of class A, teacher A gave an assignment for the next week. This made up 10% of the final mark for the class. It was to write approx one page about a given scientific topic. I completely forgot about it. When I was asked to give it in, I almost panicked but decided to lie and tell I just had forgotten it at home. Teacher A told me that if I had not done it, I would get a 0% mark for this assignment. I told him I would just get out of class at 5, get my bus and be home by 5:30, then I could scan it and e-mail it by 5:40. In fact I lived a 10-minute walk away. I ran home. Worked the fastest of my whole life, and scanned it and sent it.
Of course, I did not get a shiny 10/10%, I got a slightly above average mark, 6.5.
I am very sorry if I sounded like an arrogant
, however I believe that using strong, politically uncorrect words and not hiding behind euphemisms have helped my ideas to be very clear.
Edit :
The previous was for engineering. But let's talk about research : the Ecole Normale Superieure. That is the most elite education you can get if you want to become a researcher.
"Fun fact : All the french Fields medalists have studied, at undergrad level, at the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris which, alone, produced more medalists (still talking of undergrad) than all the universities in the Ivy League, Cambridge, Oxford and MIT ... combined."
You can read all in :
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